If you're like me, you have such a busy, full, highly
stimulated life that it's really hard to pay attention to
everything around you. You meet people and talk with them, and
afterward you can't remember what their name was or what they
were wearing. I am terribly inattentive to all kinds of details. I
flunk the husband test all the time. On Saturday night when
we're trying to figure out what clothes we're going to
wear to church, if Ginger asks, "What did I wear to church
last Sunday?" I'll say, "I don't know, why
are you asking me ...!"

In this series we're finding out what God's heart
for the world is. In our first message (Discovery Paper 4851) we
looked at some passages in Genesis where, in response to the need
of the world, God promised Abraham that through his seed all of the
nations of the earth would be blessed. We saw that Jesus was the
fulfillment of that promise, the One who met the need of all the
peoples of the world. We saw that God has always loved the whole
world and has wanted to provide for the need of every man and woman
on the face of the earth throughout all of history.

In our second message (Discovery Paper 4852) we looked at the
importance of the gospel message of Jesus Christ. Because of the
destructiveness of sin, the world really needs a Savior, and that
Savior is Jesus Christ. God has satisfied his just wrath against
sin and has opened up the floodgates of his love toward us through
Jesus' sacrificial death. This message of salvation in Jesus
is what the whole world needs, and God has entrusted it to us to
proclaim to the world.

Starting in this message we're going to examine four key
passages in the New Testament where we are challenged as followers
of Jesus to be a part of the proclamation of that message to the
world. The first two passages are the words of Jesus, and the next
two are Paul's testimony of being sent out himself by God to
reach into his world.

The passage we're going to look at now is Matthew 9:35-38.
I hope it will open up a window of understanding to us, provide a
starting point for us, as we seek to be the people of God in this
task of obeying Christ as proclaimers of his truth.

Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in
their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and
healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.

Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they
were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. Then
He said to His disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the
workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send
out workers into His harvest."

Jesus displays two things to us in this passage: an
insightful vision of the world in which he lived, and a strategic
involvement in it.

What Jesus saw

Jesus had been going from village to village
teaching about the kingdom, healing people and ministering to
them.
Then in verse 36 it says, "Seeing the
people...."
This word "seeing"
means to notice something with perception.
He noticed the reality of what was happening around him.
As I said a moment ago, it is very difficult for us to do that.
We get so busy and caught up in what we're doing that life
happens around us and we don't even notice.
But Jesus paid attention to what was going on.
And perceiving what was going on with the people, he was moved with
compassion.
Compassion is a great word that comes from the same root as our
word intestines.
Down in his gut he had this incredible compassionate feeling about
what he saw.

What was it that Jesus saw?
First of all, he saw hurting people.
His compassion was poured out to them "because they were
distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd."
The word distressed is derived from a word meaning to skin an
animal.
This word came to mean annoyed or bewildered or harassed, unable to
make sense of what is happening to you and what life is all
about.
Probably most of the people Jesus encountered were relatively poor
and somewhat socially disadvantaged in their society.
They were living in a culture in which there was a great deal of
manipulation by religious leaders.
Beyond that, they were politically very insignificant.
We look at Palestine as being central to history as the place of
Jesus'
earthly life, but from the human perspective of that time it was a
little nothing province way out on the fringes of the
Roman Empire.

The second word Jesus used, dispirited, originally meant to throw
or cast down, and it came to mean discouraged or without
support.
Even in a highly communal culture, people had a sense of being
discouraged and without support.
So when Jesus looked around, he saw past the surface issues of
life, even beyond the physical needs, deep into the hearts of
people.
He saw people who were broken down and hurting, not able to answer
questions about what life was all about, and feeling like they were
in it all alone.
That sounds like a picture of our world, doesn't it?

But that's not all Jesus saw.
He also saw a plentiful harvest.
Jesus was not overwhelmed by the sense of need, even though he was
moved by it.
He didn't say, "This problem is too great.
There's nothing I can do."
He didn't say, "I don't really know these
people,"
or, "I've got another purpose in life, so
I can't really worry about that."
No, he looked at the hurting people around him and said,
"There is a plentiful harvest!"
Why would he say that?
It's because he understood that what these people needed was
hope, a sense that there was something they could have faith in,
something that could meet the deepest needs of their heart.
That was the gospel of the kingdom.
So there was hope to be given to hurting, downcast, distressed
people, and the hope was in who he was--the
Messiah, who had come to set people free from the bondage of
sin.

How can we sharpen our own sense of vision? Well, how did Jesus
get to the point that he could see what he did?

How Jesus saw

The context of this story will tell us. Let's read all of
chapter 9:

"Getting into a boat, Jesus crossed over the sea and came
to His own city. And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a
bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, 'Take
courage, son; your sins are forgiven.' And some of the
scribes said to themselves, 'This fellow blasphemes.'
And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, 'Why are you thinking
evil in your hearts? Which is easier, to say, "Your sins are
forgiven," or to say, "Get up, and walk"? But so
that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to
forgive sins'--then He said to the paralytic, 'Get up,
pick up your bed and go home.' And he got up and went home.
But when the crowds saw this, they were awestruck, and glorified
God, who had given such authority to men.

As Jesus went on from there, He saw a man called Matthew, sitting
in the tax collector's booth; and He said to him, 'Follow
Me!' And he got up and followed Him.

Then it happened that as Jesus was reclining at the table in the
house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were dining
with Jesus and His disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they
said to His disciples, 'Why is your Teacher eating with the
tax collectors and sinners?' But when Jesus heard this, He
said, 'It is not those who are healthy who need a physician,
but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: "I
desire compassion, and not sacrifice," for I did not come to
call the righteous, but sinners.'

Then the disciples of John came to Him, asking, 'Why do we
and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?' And
Jesus said to them, 'The attendants of the bridegroom cannot
mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the
days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and
then they will fast. But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on
an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a
worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins;
otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the
wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins,
and both are preserved.'

While He was saying these things to them, a synagogue official came
and bowed down before Him, and said, 'My daughter has just
died; but come and lay Your hand on her, and she will live.'
Jesus got up and began to follow him, and so did His disciples.

And a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve
years, came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak; for
she was saying to herself, 'If I only touch His garment, I
will get well.' But Jesus turning and seeing her said,
'Daughter, take courage; your faith has made you well.'
At once the woman was made well.

When Jesus came into the official's house, and saw the
flute-players and the crowd in noisy disorder, He said,
'Leave; for the girl has not died, but is asleep.' And
they began laughing at Him. But when the crowd had been sent out,
He entered and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. This news
spread throughout all that land.

As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed Him, crying
out, 'Have mercy on us, Son of David!' When He entered
the house, the blind men came up to Him, and Jesus said to them,
'Do you believe that I am able to do this?' They said
to Him, 'Yes, Lord.' Then He touched their eyes,
saying, 'It shall be done to you according to your
faith.' And their eyes were opened. And Jesus sternly warned
them: 'See that no one knows about this!' But they went
out and spread the news about Him throughout all that land.

As they were going out, a mute, demon-possessed man was brought to
Him. After the demon was cast out, the mute man spoke; and the
crowds were amazed, and were saying, 'Nothing like this has
ever been seen in Israel.' But the Pharisees were saying,
'He casts out the demons by the ruler of the
demons.'

Jesus was going through all the cities and villages, teaching in
their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and
healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness.

Seeing the people, He felt compassion for them, because they were
distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd. Then He
said to His disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the
workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send
out workers into His harvest.'"

He had quite a day, didn't he?
He healed a paralytic who was brought to him, and as he did that he
taught about forgiveness of sins.
He called out Matthew the tax collector and dined with him and some
other tax-collectors and sinners, then he was criticized by the
Pharisees for hanging around with such people, and defended his
actions as appropriate.
He taught the disciples of John about who he was and what the
kingdom was about.
He healed a woman with a hemorrhage while on the way to raising the
dead daughter of a synagogue official.
Then he healed two blind men and cast out a demon from a mute,
possessed man.
He kept on teaching about the kingdom and healing, and he did all
of this under constant scrutiny and criticism from the
Pharisees.

So how did Jesus sharpen his vision?
By being out where people were, where the hurt was.
As a way of life, he stopped and paid attention to the people he
encountered.
When he was going to raise the dead daughter of the synagogue
official and was interrupted on his way by the woman who touched
his garment, surely he could have said, "I am about to raise
the dead girl, and
I haven't got time for this."
But even then he stopped and showed compassion to her before going
on his way.
At every turn Jesus was out there among people.
He didn't isolate himself or get caught up in some sense of
personal mission so that he had no time to give people.

There is no secret formula to gaining spiritual insight into
people's lives.
We need to grow in our knowledge and understanding of the kingdom
of
God, and we need to be out there with people.
There's an attitude about life as ministry that permeates the
texture of
New-Testament descriptions of being a Christ-follower.
Ministry is not something that belongs in a compartment.
Ministry is paying attention to what's going on and being
involved in the lives of the people
God has placed in our path.
So the way we sharpen our own vision is by simply getting out there
and mixing it up, paying attention to people and seeing what
God is doing in their lives.

Jesus went on to give the disciples, and us as an extension of
them, an insight into strategic involvement.
He did two things to get the disciples involved in the kind of
ministry he was doing.

First, he called them to prayer.
He didn't start by saying, "What are you sitting here
for?
Get up and do something!"
This is a lesson that God has been teaching me a lot about.
What happens when we just launch into ministry without prayer is
that it's easy for us to be worn out by it, for it to become
"our"
ministry that we map out in a way that we feel comfortable with,
and for us to somehow be a little detached from it.

But when we become men and women of prayer, two things happen to
us.
One is that it puts us in tune with what God is doing.
It humbles us before the Lord and allows us to then approach life
and ministry out of a sense of submission to his lordship in our
lives and in the world.
And the other is that it focuses our attention on the need as we
cry out to
God to help meet that need.
Nothing makes my heart more prepared to be involved in
people's lives than to pray for them.
So we need to look around in our offices, in our families
where there is trouble going on, or in our neighborhoods where
people are distressed and downtrodden, and pray for those people,
see them as the harvest that is plentiful, and ask
God to raise up people who can be a witness for him, to send
laborers into that harvest.

The second thing Jesus did was send the disciples into action.
When we begin to pray about these things,
God begins to prepare us for the next step.
Right after this in 10:1, Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and
gave them authority to cast out unclean spirits and to heal every
kind of disease and sickness, and after instructing them he sent
them out.
Having called them to pray that the Lord would send forth laborers,
then he said, "Okay, now you're ready to go.
You will be the answer to your own prayers."
Their hearts were now tuned to God as the
Lord of the harvest, their eyes were focused on the need of the
world, they were praying that
God would meet that need, and now their whole lives were ordered in
the direction of meeting the need.

As we begin to pray and tune our hearts toward
God, we are praying ourselves into the solution.
So not only do we become men and women of prayer, we become
men and women of action that flows out of our prayers.
We are ready to be people who can make a difference in our
world.

Now, these two simple things, insightful vision and strategic
involvement through prayer and action in our own world, are not
rocket science.
But there are some profound implications for us.
Let me share three things to think about.

Breaking out of self-focus, purposeful discipleship, praying for
help

First of all, we need to break out of our narrow, self-contained,
self-oriented worlds and get involved with the people around
us.
That sounds simple, but we all have ways that we are self-oriented
and self-protective in our lifestyles.
It's easy to do that even when you're in full-time
ministry.

When we lived in Vienna, Sundays would be exhausting, just as they
often are here.
What with church services and teaching and dealing with people,
I'd be pretty worn out by the end of the day.
So late on Sunday evenings I loved to just plop into my recliner
and relax.
Around ten o'clock to midnight I would zone out in front of
the
TV, watching the British sports feed of American golf
tournaments.
And one thing I just hated was for the phone to ring while
I was doing that.
I had served God that day, teaching and preaching and talking to
people, and now
I was home and I wanted to rest.
If Ginger answered the phone and said, "It's for
you,"
my blood would boil.
Who would dare interrupt my moment of respite from a hard day at
ministry?
You see, even in ministry it's so easy for us to make our
lives about us.

So I would be on the phone with someone who had a real need or
question, and inside me there was a battle going on:
One side would be saying, "How can they interrupt my need for
some rest?"
The other side would be saying, "But this person is calling
you because they really need some advice, and you've got to
minister to them."
We all know what that feels like.
God is calling us to be men and women who see the need of the world
and are able to break out of our selfishness, get out of our
recliners when it's necessary, and be willing to engage the
world around us with real caring.

The second implication for us is that we need to engage in what we
at
PBC like to call discipleship with a purpose.
Notice that Jesus went around teaching about the kingdom of
God while he was healing and ministering.
It's not either one or the other.
It all goes together.
There is a partnership in the growing process.
There is a place to be learning about the kingdom of
God and teaching and proclaiming the kingdom of
God, and there is a place for caring for people's needs.
So our discipleship might consist of hearing the word of
God taught on Sunday morning, going to a Sunday
School class, being in a discipleship group or home group, or
studying the
Scriptures on our own.
And as we grow in our understanding of the kingdom of
God, who Christ is, and the wonder of his salvation, at the same
time we're opening our eyes to the need of the world, so that
as we live in the world as kingdom people, we actually have
something to offer to the world.
We are equipped to meet needs, to make a difference.

The third implication here is that we need to be people of prayer
who ask
God for eyes to see, courage to engage, and wisdom to know how.
I am terribly oblivious to things around me, so
God in his great mercy and his genius gave me a wife who is much
more perceptive about things than
I am, and she is constantly bringing me back to consciousness of
things
I need to be paying attention to.
As we pray for God to give us eyes to see, maybe he will provide us
with our own growing eyesight, or maybe he will provide us with
people around us who can encourage us to open our eyes to ministry
and need.
But either way I believe we need to become men and women of
prayer.
God has taught me so much about this in recent years;
particularly in the last year he has taught me how little prayer
has figured in cultivating my heart for
God and my heart for the world.
I am really humbled and thankful that God has begun to teach me the
wonder of what it means to really pray for people, and the
difference it's made in my own approach to life and
ministry.
And I still have much to learn in that.

We need to pray for the courage and the wisdom to engage.
It scares me to death to walk into situations where
I am going to be asked questions.
I've been in ministry all these years and
I still don't have good answers for most of the questions out
there.
So I struggle and have to trust God for wisdom and courage.
We all have to be able to say, "God, it's scary and
uncomfortable, but
I am going to walk into that with you."
And the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in us will make it
possible for us to do it.
So we step out, trusting and praying for God to give us courage and
wisdom.
When I don't know exactly what to do, sometimes the right
thing to do is just to be there, to comfort and care, and then
God will give me the wisdom to know what to say in the right
situation.

We need to be men and women of prayer who are seeing our world
through
Christ's eyes and embracing our world with
Christ's love.
God has taught me this lesson over and over in different ways.
Let me share a story with you.

When we lived in Vienna, one of the ways we got involved in the
community was through
Little League baseball.
I was part of a group of guys who started the program in
Vienna.
There was enough of an American family presence to start the core
group off, and people from a lot of different countries got
involved in the league.
It was a lot of fun.
And in any highly mobile population, as Vienna is, if you stay
there long enough you become important.
The other founders of the league moved on, and
I was one of the original founders who stayed, so after a while
I became an important person by the simple fact that
I was still there.

We were the only official Little League registered in
Austria, so we were automatically the Austrian champions, and we
got to take our all-star team to the
European tournament every year.
For four years I coached the all-star team of eleven-and
twelve-year old boys going to that tournament.
One year one of the coaches in the group was really hard to get
along with, and almost no one liked him.
There were always problems, and I spent a lot of my time that year
just trying to manage the dynamics among the coaches.
It was a tough season.

We were involved with these families for several years, and when my
fortieth birthday came along,
Ginger planned a huge surprise party for me.
I walked into the house one Saturday afternoon with these guys, and
there were fifty-plus people in our house waiting for me.
I was totally blown away.
Later I was opening gifts, and when I opened one box,
I looked up at the guy who had given me this gift and asked,
"Is this real?"
He said yes, and everybody started asking, "What is it?
What is it?"
It was a baseball autographed by Warren Spahn.
It was actually authentic.
This guy had had it autographed when he was a little boy.
He'd had it all these years, and he gave it to me on my
fortieth birthday.
It's still the most sacrificial gift anyone has ever given
me.

Later, the coach who had been so difficult to get along with came
up to me and said, "I'm not jealous that you have that
baseball, but
I am jealous that you have a friend who would give it to
you."
In that moment God pulled back the curtain and gave me new eyes to
see him.
This guy was hurting and lonely.
You could say some of it was his own making, but he needed someone
to care about him.
That gave us some opportunities to minister to him and his
family.

How easy it is for us to say someone is just obnoxious.
If they're hard to get along with, or they have issues that
are difficult, we want to just push them aside, shut them out,
pigeon-hole them as impossible.
But God reminded me that this guy was just one of the
"distressed and dispirited like sheep without a
shepherd,"
and I needed to have God's eyes to see that he needed a
friend and he needed a
Savior, to have that kind of insight and wisdom.

Jesus saw people.
He noticed.
He paid attention.
And out of that a heart of compassion sprang into action to
minister.
He called his disciples to pray and be involved that way, and
that's what he is calling us to do.
He is calling us to be men and women who can see the world we live
in, perceive the needs, pray for
God to raise up people to meet the needs, and then ourselves become
part of the answer by being engaged in the wonderful harvest
that's out there.